This card has provided a great deal of inspiration for me and many others in the post banning Standard environment. It may not seem like much to anyone who has not played it before, however, anyone who has tested it knows that what it does is amazing for any deck with creatures. There is a rogue deck right now that is getting some attention. The deck is called Cloudy Skies but it was originally named U/w Fish for any of you who knew it by that name.

This U/w fish deck was designed to be similar to the U/R Fish deck that was played heavily in Vintage about six months ago. The designers of this deck wanted to see if they could build Fish in Standard. Now, the two decks are not nearly the same but they function the same way, meaning that they try to accomplish the same things. The goal of both decks is to play early small threats and then use mana denial techniques and counters to keep your opponent from playing threats. Another thing that these decks have in common is their ability to generate card advantage. (Card advantage can be summed up as basically: getting more than one goal accomplished from the least amount of cards or forcing your opponent to waste more than one card to deal with one of yours.)

This deck is quite good in the current environment. It has the counter part of mono blue combined with the Aggro almost like white weenie and a control combo built into the deck. The control combo just so everyone is certain is Ghostly Prison

– This also serves as early damage but it is also one of your lock parts if you need it.

Spiketail and Replica – Both of these cards are good flyers as well as counters that stay in play. One great thing about these are if mono blue lets them resolve then when you sac them to counter their spells they cannot counter them. So basically if they resolve they serve as kind of Last Word

Hokori – He is one of the reasons that this deck it so good. His ability is great against so much of the field right now. Again, if you have not played him his ability looks ok but not overly great. You cannot possibly understand how good he is until you play him….or until he’s played against you.

– This card is the draw engine of the deck. It lets you draw into the lock, counters, bounce, and the rest of your creatures. The best draw for this deck is first turn 1/1 flyer for 1 and second turn chrome mox and mask. Then from there you can counter anything else or lock them down. When you pull this off it is hard to beat.

– With this card you can bounce anything problematic and then counter it and it also deals with tokens quite well.

Mana – the mana base is quite stable but I would consider tendo ice bridge if you are building this deck. I really like that card and it’s function is well served.

That is the basics of the deck and its workings. This deck gave me much inspiration and it is pretty fun to play as well. After seeing the interaction of mask of memory and how good it was I had a great idea for another use for it and also I figured I’d leave everyone with another deck to think about and possibly play. While I was testing the cloudy skies deck I thought of another way to break mask of memory. First I will show everyone the deck so you can think about it for a second before I reveal my secrets.

Ok so the secret of this deck is to get a mask of memory on a creature with fear (fear is pretty good ability again). With all that card drawing you should have an answer for all of their creatures and their hand. Even mono blue has a hard time dealing with that much card draw against them. Overall this plays like mono black control except it usually wins faster and is more stable.

I hope I have given everyone some good ideas and if nothing else provided some potential decks for everyone to play. So until the next stop on our journey through Standard, don’t forget to have fun when you play magic because that’s what the game is all about.

As always if you have any questions about the deck email me.

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